The Girl in The Red Coat

I came across a shocking story recently about a girl who posted a video of her visit to an abortion clinic on a media sharing app called Tik Tok. The girl is seen laughing and joking around with her friends and the staff as she cheerfully skips into the clinic for her second abortion. It’s as if she is going to Disney World for a day of fun instead of undergoing a medical procedure to end the life of her unborn child.

I don’t know why but it reminded me of a scene in the movie Schindler’s List where the Nazis are marching the Jews out of the Jewish ghetto and onto the trains bound for the concentration camps. The whole movie was shot in black and white but in this scene there is a little girl in a red coat holding her mother’s hand as they march down the street in a colorless sea of gray. In a poignant moment she turns her head toward the camera and smiles, totally oblivious to what is going to happen to her and her family as they shuffle silently to their inevitable death. The image of this little girl still brings tears to my eyes to this day. I can’t help but think that the girl gleefully skipping into the abortion clinic was not only numb to the death of her unborn child but also was oblivious of the impending death of her soul as well. My heart cries out for her as it does for the little girl in the red coat.

As we head into election season I’m reminded of the remarks made a couple of years ago by the chairman of the Democratic party, Tom Perez, who said that “every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.” Basically, what he said was that in order to be a Democrat candidate or voter one must be pro-choice. Of course, many of the pundits on the left backtracked and said that what the chairman meant was that pro-life individuals are welcome in the Democratic party as long as they accept the “settled” case law known as Roe Vs Wade which legalized abortion. So it’s ok to be a Democrat as long as you support abortion even if you believe it’s murder?

Considering this issue as a Christian, I came to the conclusion that there is a bigger question which requires a response from a source much greater than the laws of man: Can  you be pro-choice (abortion) and a follower of Jesus at the same time? Many self described Christian elected officials believe that their religious and moral beliefs can be compartmentalized from their roles as elected officials.

For instance, Joe Biden, a practicing and self described devout Catholic, expressed this common belief among many self declared Christian elected officials in a response he gave at a Vice Presidential debate in 2012 when he said, “with regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position that life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews and–I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the congressman. I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that women can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor, in my view. And the Supreme Court–I’m not going to interfere with that”.

In effect, he admits that he believes life begins at conception and therefore is from  that moment a living human being created by God. By admitting this fact he is affirming that the unborn are owed the same rights and privileges under the Constitution as any other citizen whether born or unborn. This is not conferring a set of special rights to a separate class of individuals but a claiming of the rights already owed. So why is he and so many other Christian politicians so reluctant to fight for this belief in the public arena?

I wonder what their reaction would be if the class of individuals being considered for legalized extermination were changed from the unborn to the mentally ill, mentally challenged, or a particular ethnic group as in Nazi Germany? Would he shrug his shoulders and say “Oh well, I know it’s against my faith and is an immoral and detestable act but the Congress and the Supreme Court have spoken” or would he  do everything in his power to fight against such injustice? Using his logic, I guess if he were in Congress in 1964 he would not have supported the Civil Rights Act. After all, previous legal precedent deemed the existing discriminatory laws on the books as constitutional. Thankfully, there were brave elected officials who fought with conviction in accordance with our founders who expressed in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. 

In 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran priest and one of the greatest theologians of our time was executed as an enemy of the state in a German concentration camp. He was murdered because of his stand against the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children who were deemed less than human by the Nazi regime. In the 1930’s, as the evil of Naziism spread throughout German society like a cancer, Bonhoeffer stood in opposition to the leaders in his church who allowed the Nazi government to co-opt the church into looking the other way and in many cases helping to carry out  it’s demonic scheme to commit genocide on a grand scale. He watched as the crosses were removed and replaced with swastikas. He watched as the church removed the Old Testament from its bibles because it was deemed “too Jewish” by the regime. He also watched the politicians of his day, many of whom graced the pews during his services, sell out their beliefs simply to maintain favor with the regime and therefore maintain power. Isn’t that what’s going on here in America now? Instead of the Jews it is the lives of the unborn who are being targeted by society as unworthy to even breathe their first breath.

In his book, Ethics,  Bonhoeffer said, “Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder”.

It has been said that a society can be judged by how it treats the least among them. Are there any more vulnerable than the unborn who have not even the breath in their lungs to be able to scream in their own defense? Scripture says in Psalms 22:9-10, “Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast. From birth I was cast on you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God.”  Yes we are God’s children even in the womb and therefore we will be held accountable for these precious lives by our God who has given us this life to nurture, love and protect. We must fight for the little girls in the red coats.